The officers and men ofMy Detachmentare not the sort of people who appear in war moviesthey are the ones who appear only in war, and they are unforgettable. Unrelentingly honest, rueful, and revealing,My Detachmentgives us war without heroism, while preserving those rare moments of redeeming grace in the midst of lunacy and danger. With remarkable clarity and with great detachment, Kidder looks back at himself from across three and a half decades, confessing how, as a young lieutenant, he sought to borrow from the tragedy around him and to imagine himself a romantic hero.
Kidder realized that he would spend his time in Vietnam listening in on battle but never actually experiencing it. Together, they sought a ghostly enemy, homing in on radio transmissions and funneling intelligence gathered by others. He eventually learned not only to lead them but to laugh and drink with them as they shared the boredom, pointlessness, and fear of war. There, lovesick, anxious, and melancholic, he tried to assume command of his detachment, a ragtag band of eight more-or-less ungovernable men charged with reporting on enemy radio locations.
Kidder was an ROTC intelligence officer, just months out of college and expecting a stateside assignment, when his orders arrived for Vietnam. This extraordinary memoir is destined to become a classic.
In an astonishingly honest, comic, and moving account of his tour of duty in Vietnam, master storyteller Tracy Kidder writes for the first time about himself. My Detachmentis a war story like none you have ever read before, an unromanticized portrait of a young man coming of age in the controversial war that defined a generation.
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